Trail of Tears

Trail of Tears, in U.S. history, the forced relocation during the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States (including Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations) to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Estimates based on tribal and military records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forced from their homes during that period, which is sometimes known as the removal era, and that some 15,000 died during the journey west. The term Trail of Tears invokes the collective suffering those people experienced, although it is most commonly used in reference to the removal experiences of the Southeast Indians generally and the Cherokee nation specifically. The physical trail consisted of several overland routes and one main water route and, by passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act in 2009, stretched some 5,045 miles (about 8,120 km) across portions of nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee).

The roots of forced relocation lay in greed. The British Proclamation of 1763 designated the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as Indian Territory. Although that region was to be protected for the exclusive use of indigenous peoples, large numbers of Euro-American land speculators and settlers soon entered. For the most part, the British and, later, U.S. governments ignored these acts of trespass.

In 1829 a gold rush occurred on Cherokee land in Georgia. Vast amounts of wealth were at stake: at their peak, Georgia mines produced approximately 300 ounces of gold a day. Land speculators soon demanded that the U.S. Congress devolve to the states the control of all real property owned by tribes and their members. That position was supported by Pres. Andrew Jackson, who was himself an avid speculator. Congress complied by passing the Indian Removal Act (1830). The act entitled the president to negotiate with the eastern nations to effect their removal to tracts of land west of the Mississippi and provided some $500,000 for transportation and for compensation to native landowners. Jackson reiterated his support for the act in various messages to Congress, notably “On Indian Removal” (1830) and “A Permanent Habitation for the American Indians” (1835), which illuminated his political justifications for removal and described some of the outcomes he expected would derive from the relocation process.

Indigenous reactions to the Indian Removal Act varied. The Southeast Indians were for the most part tightly organized and heavily invested in agriculture. The farms of the most populous tribes—the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee—were particularly coveted by outsiders because they were located in prime agricultural areas and were very well developed. This meant that speculators who purchased such properties could immediately turn a profit: fields had already been cleared, pastures fenced, barns and houses built, and the like. Thus, the Southeast tribes approached federal negotiations with the goal of either reimbursement for or protection of their members’ investments.

Map showing the movement of some 100,000 Native Americans forcibly relocated to the trans-Mississippi West under the terms of the U.S. Indian Removal Act (1830).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Choctaw were the first polity to finalize negotiations: in 1830 they agreed to cede their real property for western land, transportation for themselves and their goods, and logistical support during and after the journey. However, the federal government had no experience in transporting large numbers of civilians, let alone their household effects, farming equipment, and livestock. Bureaucraticineptitude and corruption caused many Choctaw to die from exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease while traveling.

The Chickasaw signed an initial removal agreement as early as 1830, but negotiations were not finalized until 1832. Skeptical of federal assurances regarding reimbursement for their property, members of the Chickasaw nation sold their landholdings at a profit and financed their own transportation. As a result, their journey, which took place in 1837, had fewer problems than did those of the other Southeast tribes.

The Creek also finalized a removal agreement in 1832. However, Euro-American settlers and speculators moved into the planned Creek cessions prematurely, causing conflicts, delays, and fraudulent land sales that delayed the Creek journey until 1836. Federal authorities once again proved incompetent and corrupt, and many Creek people died, often from the same preventable causes that had killed Choctaw travelers.

A small group of Seminole leaders negotiated a removal agreement in 1832, but a majority of the tribe protested that the signatories had no authority to represent them. The United States insisted that the agreement should hold, instigating such fierce resistance to removal that the ensuing conflict became known as the Second Seminole War (1835–42). Although many were eventually captured and removed to the west, a substantial number of Seminole people managed to elude the authorities and remain in Florida.

The Cherokee chose to use legal action to resist removal. Their lawsuits, notably Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), reached the U.S. Supreme Court but ultimately provided no relief. As with the Seminole, a few Cherokee leaders negotiated a removal agreement that was subsequently rejected by the people as a whole. Although several families moved west in the mid-1830s, most believed that their property rights would ultimately be respected. This was not to be the case, and in 1838 the U.S. military began to force Cherokee people from their homes, often at gunpoint. Held in miserable internment camps for days or weeks before their journeys began, many became ill, and most were very poorly equipped for the arduous trip. Those who took the river route were loaded onto boats in which they traveled parts of the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers, eventually arriving at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. Not until then did the survivors receive much-needed food and supplies. Perhaps 4,000 of the estimated 15,000 Cherokee died on the journey, while some 1,000 avoided internment and built communities in North Carolina.

Traditionally, the Northeast Indian nations tended to be more mobile and less politically unified than those of the Southeast. As a result, literally dozens of band-specific removal agreements were negotiated with the peoples of that region between 1830 and 1840. Many of the groups residing in the coniferous forests of the Upper Midwest, such as various bands of Ojibwa and Ho-Chunk, agreed to cede particular tracts of land but retained in perpetuity the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild plants and timber from such properties. Groups living in the prairies and deciduous forests of the Lower Midwest, including bands of Sauk, Fox, Iowa, Illinois, and Potawatomi, ceded their land with great reluctance and were moved west in small parties, usually under pressure from speculators, settlers, and the U.S. military. A few groups attempted armed resistance, most notably a band led by the Sauk leader Black Hawk in 1832. Although their experiences are often overshadowed by those of the more-populous Southeast nations, the peoples of the Northeast constituted perhaps one-third to one-half of those who were subject to removal.

In 1987 the U.S. Congress designated the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail in memory of those who had suffered and died during removal. As mentioned above, the original trail was more than doubled in size in 2009 to reflect the addition of several newly documented routes, as well as roundup and dispersion sites.